Cementville with UWM

It's the second weekend of the two-weekend run of UWM Peck School of the Arts' Cementville. Having finally seen it, I'm kicking myself for not having seen it sooner. This is easily one of my favorites this season. Jane Martin's professional wrestling locker room comedy/drama plays on many different levels--often at once and often quite successfully.

Here we have a group of female wrestlers in a decaying locker room before and during a show in a run-down Tennessee town. Martin can be read as allegory about the nature of aggression and commerce in America. There's real thematic depth here that can be a lot of fun to pick apart. The complexity of Martin's script often plays comedy as drama and vice-versa. What's more, the script switches modes often enough that it can sometimes blur the difference between . . . say . . . a dark comedy with serious dramatic undertones and a serious drama that plays with comedy for dramatic effect.

So it's complicated. The show is populated with a rather large ensemble of characters, which makes it all the more difficult to successfully stage. It may be easy for ONE actor to deftly switch modes and moods as allegory becomes cheap sitcom humor before switching into something terrifying . . . that also happens to be funny. It may be easy for one actor to do that. Or even two. But with five or six people involved and all of them filtering in and out of the central focus of any scene, it can be very difficult to strike the right balance. Under the direction of Michael Cotey, the UWM production modulates things quite well. That being said, the script is written with a maddening level of sophistication . . . a cast could rehearse this thing 22 hours a day and not get it perfect.

The UWM production has its heart planted firmly in the right space with the production, though. Some individual moments might not feel quite right, but the overall feel and flow of the mood feels right and that's what's important.

Melanie Liebetrau and Morgan Braithwaite play the first two wrestlers to appear in the locker room at the beginning of the show--Dani and Tiger respectively. Braithwaite is a young actress playing an old veteran of the ring who has gotten pulled around her whole life. Not an easy thing for a young actor to play a beaten veteran, but Braithwaite is charmingly sturdy in the role. Liebtrau is playing a woman at the top of her game in a second-rate level of a second-rate art form that no one really takes seriously. There's real aggression and real frustration that this character feels and Liebrtrau brings it across well.

We see the two wrestlers' experience contrasted against the youthful energy of a fan girl who has always wanted to get into the ring. . . an extremely excitable young woman named Nola played by Zoe Schwartz. Schwartz sometimes plays the excitement of the character so far over the top that it's difficult to watch, but when she hits the right energy in the right synthesis with the script, she really nails it. As with so many other aspects of the production, it's really, really tricky to keep in perfect synch with a script that's this sharply written.

As the beginning of the play progresses, we are introduced to tow more wrestlers--Kiendra Honeysucker in the role of Olympic athlete Netty and Alaina Daniels as a matronly figure in the ring and in the locker room. There's a fearlessness about Daniels. She's kind of the voice of authority amongst the ladies in the locker room…not an easy thing to assert when sharing the stage more or less equally with the rest of an ensemble this big. Daniels handles it without forcing it. Honeysucker has a lean and hungry feel about her onstage that fits the role well. She has something to prove. She wants to give professional wrestling a reality it simply doesn't have.

Real aggression is played off against staged performance fighting in a theatrical production which is staging interpersonal drama for entertainment and edification. There's really interesting post-modernist things going on here that are fun to pick apart. Martin has reality squaring off against artifice as human nature squares off against commerce in numerous ways over the course of the play. Brittany Ison and Kelly Layde play tarnished, vapid commercial success in a pair of women who are known as wrestlers without actually wrestling--Dottie and Dolly Crocker. They're sex symbols who play to sensuality instead of aggression in the ring. After running into some difficulty, they are forced to slum it with the less successful in order to maintain professional momentum as celebrities. Ison and Layde have the a very clever grasp of the glamour and sensuality of Dottie and Dolly.

Layde plays with particular clarity in the role of a sweet, little girl lost in her own persona who has become sociopathic--detached from reality. The character is a really interesting analog for the side of society that has been pampered into a twisted inhumanity. Like pop culture, she's cute. And like pop culture, she'll turn on you in a second. Layde plays it with a girlish giggle in a way that ends up being every bit as disturbing as it is funny.

There's a really sharp moment between the Dottie and Dolly and their manager (aggressively played with a pleasant caustic flair by Haley Horbinski.) The two of them are in full costume--gaudy hyper-sexualized yet somehow shockingly appealing feminized versions of the classic Captain America costume. And they're sharing this moment with their maternal figure and it's both sensually pleasing and really, really disturbing at the same time. Thematically there's a lot going on there are they mentally prepare for their performance. One of the more memorable moments I've had at the theatre this past season. It's a moment that feels try much like a look at the way power structures gently caress society into being vapid enough to work against its own best interests. It's depressing and exciting at the same time. Very, very disturbing. The play hits so many visceral buttons from pleasure to revulsion to laughter to depression to anger and so on . . . that scene managed to hit a lot of them at the same time.

Also making an impressive appearance here is Christopher Westmoreland as an aging boxer from another era. In a way, he's here to deliver the deus ex machina at the end of the script. He's kind of a weak character actually . . . kind of a thinly-veiled attempt to wrap everything up once it's gotten way too far out of hand, but Westmoreland sells the reality of this old boxer with such clarity that it's easy to forget how much of the character exists as a plot device.

Of course, a play like this is going to have fighting in it. Fight choreographer Bill Watson and Fight Captain Melanie Liebetrau have brought some of the most convincing physical aggression to the stage all season. It's satisfying to finally be able to believe it when someone gets hit.

I could go on . . . but I've already gone on WAY too long. Jane Martin has taken trash pop culture and used it to peer into the psyche of contemporary culture. UWM has done a really, really good job of bringing the reality and the fantasy of that to the stage in one of the most unexpectedly satisfying productions of the season.

UWM's production of Cementville closes today with a 2pm matinee at Kenilworth 508 on 1925 eEat Kenilworth Place. UWM's next production is Almost, Maine April 3rd - 6th. For more information, visit UWM online.

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